If your computer has a multitouch trackpad or you own an external one, you probably use two finger swipes to scroll down a page, show the Notification Center and flip through your photos. But why not put your powerful trackpad to some real use with customizable gestures?

Bioshock Infinite has been one of this year’s most popular releases, garnering a following of fan promoting a positive reception when the title launched on Windows and select consoles earlier this year. Today, the Mac joins those platforms in offering Bioshock Infinite and it’s our turn to take a look at what it has to offer.

Bioshock Infinite continues the Bioshock series with a fresh new storyline, centred around the fictional floating city of Columbia and its strong political and religions themes. It’s an FPS so combat will naturally come as events unravel but a system of vigors mixes things up with unique interruption.

It’d be hard to be a creative professional and not have heard the drama around Adobe’s move to subscriptions with Creative Cloud‘s release. We’ve covered the good and bad of the move to subscriptions, and even wrote an Open Letter to Adobe about the changes. Creative Cloud has many good things — it’s even cheaper than buying Master Collection and upgrading every time — and the upgraded apps have a lot of nice new features. There’s even the value-add of font and file sync. But, if you want to own your apps, or not have to pay for upgrades and new features you don’t want, though, it’s hard to see the upside to Adobe’s new move to a subscription-only system.

The good thing is, Adobe’s got more competition for its apps than ever before, especially on the Mac. There’s an embarrassment of riches on the App Store and beyond for everything from photo editing to web design to animation. We’ve rounded up the best alternate apps to everything Adobe sells, from Acrobat to Premiere and everything in-between, so if you’re not so excited about shelling out $50/month to Adobe, here’s your chance to jump ship with great new apps.

When the word “email” springs to mind, most people think of those Monday mornings spent gazing at an endless list of messages inside Microsoft Outlook, sifting through and sorting out the useful stuff from the spam, newsletters and other promotions that somehow always end up in our inboxes. Yep, it’s true — email really is an unnecessary evil.

We think we can live without it, yet we still check our inboxes several times a day, no matter where we are — and I’m no exception. I’m pretty much married to my iPhone — as we spend almost every second of the day together — and I feel lost and disconnected when I get that dreaded “circle of death”, the GPRS indicator, meaning I can hardly access anything online.

Yet I’m always a little sceptical when developers claim that they can reinvent email. Allow me to explain why.

The App Store’s arrival on the Mac is hard to classify as anything other than a good thing. It’s made great indie Mac apps more discoverable for new Mac users, helped spur the transition of many apps from the iPad back to the Mac, lowered the price of Apple’s pro apps, and even made installing updates for OS X and apps a simple process — one that gets even simpler in Mavericks. I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on Mac App Store apps, and there’s every indicator that I’ll spend hundreds more over the coming decades.

And yet, it’s not perfect. Its sandbox restrictions have prevented apps like TextExpander from releasing their newest versions in the App Store, and the review process is slow enough that you’ll have to wait days after updates are ready to get them in your apps. But worst of all, there’s no way to offer upgrade pricing for new versions of apps. Instead, developers have to either release new versions as a free update for those who have purchased their apps already, or just make a “new” app for the new version, perhaps with a launch-day special price as an overture to those who owned the previous version.

For developers like the Omni Group, that just wouldn’t work out. (more…)

We’ve just closed our BusyCal giveaway, and would like to say Congrats to our winners: Nuri, Trevor, and allenshull!

You’re busy, and you need a calendar. That much is apparent. What’s a bit tricker to figure out is what calendar app you should use to make your busy life more manageable. You could just stick with Calendar.app, corinthian leather and all, or get by with your calendar service’s barebones web app.

Or, you could get the calendar that has been the leading full-featured calendar app on the Mac for years: BusyCal. With a legacy dating back 4 years, it’s been the pro calendar alternate of choice ever since Apple decided to rebrand iCal. It’s easy to use, with a UI similar to the older iCal, but packed with extra features like customizable calendar views, built-in weather and moon phases, alarms and to-dos right alongside your calendar events, and more. It’s just been updated to support Exchange calendars, so it can help you keep track of your work events right alongside your personal calendars and todo lists.

Everything going on, in one place, with BusyCal

All of that power normally comes at a cost — $29.99 to be precise — but this week we’ve got 3 copies of BusyCal to giveaway to our readers. All you have to do is leave a comment below letting us know what calendar app you currently use and why you want to switch to BusyCal, and you’ll be entered in the giveaway. Then, share the giveaway on your favorite social networks and share a link to the post in a second comment below for an extra entry in the giveaway.

Hurry and get your entries in; we’ll close the giveaway on Tuesday, September 3rd.

Envato staff or those who have written more than two articles or tutorials for AppStorm are ineligible to enter.

The epitome of a businessperson always used to be an employee of a Venture Capital company on Wall Street. When someone spoke about this sort of individual, you’d imagine them with short hair, always wearing a suit and tie, typically taking a taxi to the workplace each day, and maybe going out for nightly cocktails with equally important people at the karaoke bar a few blocks from work. This would be the typical stockbroker.

In his set of tools, the aforementioned person would typically have two displays at his desk always keeping an eye on the industries he’s responsible for. In the movie version of his life, at least, the stock app would look beautiful — but in real life, they usually look more like the LED ticker boards in use on Wall Street. There’s never really been a native Mac app dedicated to making stock market monitoring an effortless — and may we say, tastefully designed — task. At least, that used to be the issue. Visible Market, the developer of StockTouch for iPad, has recently brought its popular iOS Stocks app alternative to the Mac. It’s pretty, yes, but does it do the job?(more…)

I adore my Retina MacBook Pro. It’s powerful and fast, and that display is beautiful. As an early adopter, I’m well aware of some of the compromises I’ve had to make for this laptop. Early adopters are different than the rest of consumers — we don’t care if we need to adopt hacks or special utilities for our new toys. We already own the future.

But those hacks and utilities aren’t always easy to find. That’s why we’ve compiled some insanely useful apps for your shiny machine. It took me months to realize I needed some of these, but especially if you’re a developer, you’ll easily see why you need these tools. Here’s the best little utilities to make your retina display MacBook even better.

You won’t believe it but it’s true: Snapheal, the award-winning image-healing photo editor, is absolutely FREE this week for Mac.AppStorm readers!

Snapheal is the fastest, easiest software available to help pro and amateur photographers remove unwanted objects, heal skin blemishes, and fix common imperfections such as scratches in photos. Just mark what you want removed, and then click one button — Snapheal will do the rest.

Restore old photos, heal skin blemishes and remove wires, people, pets, signs, watermarks and more – anything that distracts from your favorite photos. Finish your images before sharing them on your favorite social networks by adjusting exposure, toning, sharpening or blurring details. With 20 handy tools in all, it’s got everything you need to make your photos pop. And this week, you can get all of that for free!

Go Get Your Free Copy of Snapheal Today!

Even if you’re not an imaging editing guru, Snapheal is an ideal tool for anyone who wants an uncomplicated way to quickly improve photos. Normally $24.99, you can get Snapheal absolutely free this week until September 3, 2013. Make sure you download it here and try it on your favorite photos!

The RSS reader market was fully dominated by Google Reader for years, and the best native apps for RSS were all designed to sync with Google Reader. There just wasn’t any other way to compete. In that market, Reeder quickly won most of us over with its beautiful UI, something that other apps rushed to copy.

Then, Google announced that it was closing down Google Reader, and we all rushed to find another way to read our feeds. There’s great Mac-only RSS apps, like the new NetNewsWire 4 beta and the just-released Leaf 2, but that’s going to keep you from reading your feeds on the go. You’ll still get your feeds, but will have lost the ability to read your feeds from anywhere that you had with Google Reader.

Syncing’s tough, of course, and there’s so many popular services now you’d need to support. To that challenge, one unlikely app has risen to be the best-in-class app that’s the one app any serious RSS user on the Mac should buy: ReadKit. Now with the customizable sharing options you’d have expected from Reeder, it’s the one RSS reader to beat.